By MIchael brannigan

Published 8:21 pm, Saturday, November 26, 2011

In July 1621, just months before our historic feast of thanks, Pilgrims Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins and their Patuxet Native guide Squanto set out to bring gifts to the Indian leader Massasoit. Along the way, they discovered deep circular holes in the ground throughout the terrain.

In his sterling account, "Mayflower," Nathaniel Philbrick calls them "memory holes," deliberately dug into the earth to remind travelers of memorable occurrences at those spots so that "things of great antiquity are fresh in memory." Our Native Americans understood that the journey forward also required looking back, knowing our history, how we got to where we are. They knew the meaning of pilgrimage.

As to those religious dissenters called Pilgrims, we tend to overlook what they themselves embodied through their perilous passage over dark seas and through unknown wilderness — pilgrimage as a sacred and moral journey.

We, too, are pilgrims once we leave our secure origins to wrestle with promise and peril, delight and anguish. And our pilgrimage is at its core spiritual, a sacred career where we encounter monsters and angels while hoping to return home to our spiritual source and realize our connectedness with all else.

This spiritual journey is not about belonging to a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple. Our pilgrimage is inward, recognizing that life is a bountiful mystery compelling faith in what lies beyond and strength to confront what is bound up in that mystery — uncertainty, finitude and death.

Today, we've discarded this notion of mystery. We've lost sense of life as a moral, existential and spiritual pilgrimage. In our effort to seek meaning through science, technology, medicine, individuality and material progress, we measure our journey in terms of accumulation. Our foremost value lies in exchange in that we are consumed by consumerism. The mundane is our new "sacred." Thanksgiving Thursday's Black Friday is frenzied evidence of our spiritual homelessness.

For further evidence, consider how we view growing old. No one is better qualified to teach us about our pilgrimage than those pilgrims who have weathered many seasons and storms, those who have grown old. Only after enduring struggle and hardship can we fathom our journey's meaning, a meaning only a metaphysical, spiritual quest can uncover.

Our elders can remind us that the core of our journey runs deep, that, writes Thomas Cole in "The Journey of Life," we are "spiritual animals, who need love and meaning no less than food, clothing, shelter or health care."

Yet growing old has become a scientific-medical challenge, a pathology of bodily degeneration managed through enhancement, curing disease and extending life (or prolonging dying). Attempting to master mystery, this medicalizing of aging further annuls any cohesive philosophy of life stages. We exalt youth, promise and productivity, but denigrate old age. And so, we remain oblivious to our life-journey's interconnectedness and ignore its memory holes. Chronological age measures and defines us. As pilgrims, however, we rebel and insist that the measure of our lives lies not in years but in how we undertake the journey, in our struggle to stay on the right path.

In John Bunyan's 1678 masterpiece, "Pilgrim's Progress," throughout his journey to the Celestial City, Christian is challenged to compromise his integrity by conforming to the world's superficiality, as in the town of Vanity. Here, villagers celebrate a never-ending festival, Vanity Fair, where everything is a commodity. Everything can be bought.

We are like Christian. Like him, we are not superhuman, just ordinary persons with mundane foibles and fears. Like him, our salvation rests upon knowing our limits and embracing our life-journey, not as a problem to solve but as ultimate mystery. Like him, our true progress is spiritual. Though Vanity Fairs abound, exchange is salvation's false ticket. Our road is profoundly moral, spiritual, and inseparably personal and communal.